neither/nor


mondo cinema and beyond 1960s — 1980s


38


Using “documentary” as a stylistic conceit, Cannibal Holocaust was the logical endpoint, or perhaps rejoinder, to the Mondo movie’s tradition of staged exposé.


Te film begins with an aerial view of the Amazon basin accompanied by a swoony theme from none other than Ríz Ortolani, before moving to a framing device, a clearly fictional backdrop to offset the purported veracity of what’s to come. A New York University anthropologist, Prof. Monroe (Robert Kerman), leads a rescue mission to find a quartet of documentary filmmakers gone missing in the rain forest, but instead


discovers their gruesome remains, as well as a few reels of their last cinematic testament. Back in NYC, he sits down to watch the raw footage, beginning the movie’s film-within-a-film, Te Green Inferno. (Te title was borrowed by Eli Roth for his 2015 cannibal film.)


Te footage reveals the utterly unscrupulous methods of the departed documentarians, who manufacture tragedy among the Amazonian tribes in order to get sufficiently exciting material, though, like many a Mondo filmmaker before them, they claim to be objectively studying their subjects. (In due time they


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